Lyric Earwig

This song was in my head a great deal this week. And by “in my head” I mean that every time I woke up in the night for four nights running, this song was playing on my internal soundtrack. I found myself humming it when my mind wasn’t on anything else. I sang it, always in French, though I have only half-memorized the words, so there was a good deal of mumbling inside my head. Over and over and over. For four days, all day, all night, even in my sleep. Even in my dreams.

It’s always been a song, not a poem per se. The music was written by Kurt Weill in 1934, during his exile in France, as incidental music for the play Marie Galante.

The music, which I adore, is a tango in the style of a habanera. It’s sweet and sad and exactly captures the longing for escape from what Europe had become in the 1930s, or was about to become. Within a year of writing this music, Weill would flee France for the United States — one of the lucky few.

The song was given lyrics in 1946 by Roger Fernay. Fernay, the son of a music publisher, studied to become a lawyer but decided he’d rather be an actor instead. He worked on the French stage for about a decade, then became a writer for stage and screen. He spent the rest of his career unionizing writers and working on international copyright law. “Youkali” is his principal claim to fame.

Here is the exquisite Ute Lemper, the German chanteuse and actress renowned for her interpretation of the work of Kurt Weill,performing it exquisitely:

It was almost at world’s end
That my vagabond little boat,
Wandering at the will of the waves,
Conducted me one day.
The island is very small
But the spirit that lives there
Kindly invited us
To take a walk around

Youkali, it’s the land of our desires
Youkali, it’s happiness, it’s pleasure
Youkali, it’s the land where you leave all your worries behind
It’s like a shaft of light in a dark night
The star we follow
It’s Youkali

And life carries us along
In tedium, day by day.
But the poor human soul,
Searching everywhere for oblivion,
Has, in order to escape the world,
Managed to find the mystery
Where dreams burrow themselves
In some Youkali.

My Other Blogs

September Songs was a month-long music blog. I wrote about the songs and performers who meant the most to me. Some may find it a little tweedy (heck, some people find me a little tweedy!), but there were lots and lots of cool videos and maybe some interesting little things to read.

50 Words, 210 People was a nifty writing experiment, now completed, in which I wrote exactly fifty words a day about 210 different people who had touched my life in some way.

Are You on Facebook?

If so, please join Facebook's BlogNetworks, and tell everyone you read Notes from the Dreamtime! Just click on the little "Join BlogNetworks" link and you'll be added as a Dreamtime "fan," then please give us as many stars as you think we deserve.

Shaman Portal

Folks, I'm pleased to announce that Notes from the Dreamtime has been accepted as one of the blogs on Shaman Portal! They have a lot of nice features, including international news about shamans and shamanism, articles, videos, and a Talking Stick Forum. Please check them out!